


Boy with the Broken Halo

by betts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hate Sex, Heavy Angst, Kidnapping, Pre-Canon, Self-Harm, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicide Attempt, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, if you choose to read this after looking at the tags, the tags are really selling it aren't they, we should probably be friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-23 08:30:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17076878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts
Summary: Clarke gets kidnapped by a man in a mask.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At long last, the kidnapper au has arrived. This is entirely the fault of anons, and also the most challenging one-shot I've ever written.
> 
> Apologies for plot holes, canon inconsistencies, and scientific/biological inaccuracies. I did my best.
> 
> Title from "Sinister Kid" by the Black Keys.
> 
> Please note I have chosen not to warn.

 

* * *

 

Everyone thinks Clarke Griffin is spoiled, because her mom is a doctor and her dad is a scientist, but they don’t know that she works fifteen hours a day. She wakes up at five in the morning to start school by six, which ends at two with only a half-hour lunch break. She has Unity Club after that, then dinner, when she sits down with her parents for about twenty minutes, and leaves again to start her night shift at the clinic. She’s an intern for Jackson, because she’s been put on the fast-track through med apprenticeship so she can hit the ground running as soon as she graduates.

It’s nearing midnight when she finishes up her shift. She won a prize in Unity Club today for getting the most points in Ark History Trivia: two small candy bars. She was saving them for when she got home, but as she leaves the clinic, she sees the new janitor emptying out the trash bins. Every evening she tells him to have a good night, but he only ever nods in return. He's new; it’s only his third week. He seems young, a few years older than her, and she wonders why she’s never seen him around at mixers or anything. Then again, it’s not like she has time for mixers herself. Half the Ark could collapse and she would still be too busy to notice.

“Hi,” she tells him tonight, her hands behind her back, a bar in each one. One of the chocolates has raspberry in it and the other has peanut butter. She doesn’t have a preference.

He darts a glance at her and gives a small nod, picks up the trash bin and dumps it into the big can he wheels around the clinic. He always seems so nervous when she approaches him, and sad all the time.

“Pick a hand,” she says, holding both her fists out to him.

He stares at her as if he doesn’t understand what language she’s speaking, or why she’s speaking to him at all.

“It’s okay. Go ahead.”

He taps her left hand. She turns it over and opens it. When he only continues to look confused, she says, “It’s for you. It’s candy.”

“I can’t accept that.” His voice is deeper than she thought it would be. Quieter.

Chocolate is hard to come by, sure, but it’s not morphine or anything. She slides it in the breast pocket of his coveralls. “Just a little thank-you for all the work you do.”

He puts his hand over his pocket as if to take it out and hand it back to her, but she walks away before he can, calling behind her shoulder, “Goodnight, I’ll see you tomorrow!”

 

* * *

 

A week later, she’s rushing home after her clinic shift to finish her homework. She’ll get done by two, maybe, then she can catch a few hours of sleep before she does it all again. Tomorrow, at least, is Chess Club with Wells, which is kind of a fun activity, or at least would be, if Wells weren’t so competitive. She thinks he’s becoming more like his dad every day.

She’s thinking about how much she wants to get out of her scrubs and into the shower when she notices heavy footsteps rushing behind her, and she’s about to move out of the way of whoever is in a hurry, when a hand claps over her mouth from behind. In the hand is a swath of cotton with something wet on it. Another arm snakes around her chest. A large body is pressed against her back. She panics, thrashes, tries to scream, but in doing so breathes in whatever is on the cotton. Her head feels like it’s being squeezed. Her body floats away. She slumps against the form behind her, and everything goes dark.

 

* * *

 

She comes to with a vague headache. When she opens her eyes, a bright light is piercing through the ceiling, blinking through the blades of a slow-spinning fan. She moves her hand up to cover her eyes. The other hand follows. Her wrists are bound together with steel cuffs, a second chain slotted between them. She tracks the length of it with her eyes to find where it stops: a pole in the corner of a narrow room. She’s lying on a cot folded down from the wall, which takes up nearly half the small space, barely bigger than a closet. A table sits in the opposite corner. A basin of water, a pitcher, and a glass are on top.

On the other side of the room is a door with a heavy-looking lever locking it shut, and beside the door sits a man on the ground, his back to the wall, a large gun across his lap. He’s wearing a mask, what looks like a gas mask but not quite. The kind of mask that engineers use in parts of the Ark where the oxygen has been cut off. He’s wearing a heavy canvas jumpsuit like the engineers wear too, sturdier than regular clothes but not enough to spacewalk. A shock baton is slotted into a holster on his belt.

Several minutes pass where she does nothing but stare at him. He’s so still that she wonders if he’s dead, or not real at all. A mannequin propped up to scare her. She can’t see his eyes but she thinks he’s watching her. What seems apparent — that she’s been kidnapped — is so absurd that she can’t wrap her foggy mind around it. She’s dreaming, or it’s a prank by one of the mean boys in Unity Club, the ones who snap her bra. Then, bizarrely, she gets irritated. She has homework due tomorrow. She doesn’t have time to be kidnapped.

Finally, her mind clears, and she realizes: this man is going to do god-knows-what to her.

“What do you want?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse, just a rasp. “Who are you?”

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t. The mask prevents it.

“Do you know who I am? I’m Clarke Griffin. Abby and Jake Griffin’s daughter. You have to let me go.”

Nothing.

“Just tell me what you want and I’ll make sure you get it. Let me go and we’ll work it out.”

Still nothing.

“Are you sick or something? My mom can help you. We can get you money, or pills, or, or whatever you want. Please. Please just unlock the cuffs and let me go and we can work this all out. I promise you won’t get in trouble.”

A sound comes out of the mask, a single warbled huff. He’s laughing.

She tugs the cuffs, the chain. The sound rattles and echoes. She stands from the bed and pulls harder, yanks until her wrists start to ache. At least her feet aren’t bound. Distantly she can feel the coldness of the room but it doesn’t register over her adrenaline-addled body.

She pulls and pulls, gets as close to him as she can, but the chain stops her short a couple feet from him. She falls to her knees, tries to peer through the darkened glass of his visor. “Just tell me what you want. Please. I’m begging you, just let me go.”

He rests his head against the wall. He’s not going to speak to her, and he’s not going to let her go.

 

* * *

 

She cried so hard, for so long, that she exhausted herself and fell asleep. She awakens shivering, a headache scraping the inside of her skull. Her wrists sting; her muscles ache. Her mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with gauze. Even her eyelids throb. She was hoping for a few seconds of reprieve when she awoke, moments where she could pretend she was in her own bed, and her alarm was going off, and it was time for school. But no. The moment she came to consciousness, she remembered where she was and how she got here.

Her nose is numb with cold, but her body is warm. It takes her a moment to realize a blanket has been draped over her, the scratchy wool kind from the clinic that are ugly, but easy and cheap to make, and impossibly warm. When she sits up, all her aches grow tenfold. She glances to the door. The man is gone. She stands and tries to pull herself toward it, but cries out when the cuffs dig into her raw, bruised wrists.

She forces herself to take a series of deep breaths, the exercises she cycles through with her anxious patients before their procedures. She goes to the table and pours herself a glass of water from the pitcher. Beside the pitcher is a small basin and a towel, and she fills it half-full of water, leans down, and rinses her cheeks of the crusty saline. She dries her face and hands with the towel, glances over and sees a narrow door she hadn’t noticed before. She slides it open and finds a toilet stall, barely big enough to stand in, the kind in the oldest and, if she’s being honest, poorest parts of the Ark. No running water, just a steel basin and a hydraulic flushing mechanism. Well, she thinks, that solves that problem.

She spends the next several minutes — or maybe hours, she can’t tell — casing the entire room. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s looking for, tools to help escape, clues as to what part of the Ark she’s in exactly. Vents, rusty nails, microphones, anything. She comes up empty.

Then, lacking anything more productive to do, she screams. She screams and screams and screams, yanks even more at her chains, until her head feels like it’s been split open, and her throat has been carved out with a spoon.

More than anything, she wishes she had some kind of clock. Then again, she thinks, maybe that would make it worse, knowing exactly how much time she’s been here. Everything she’s missing.

She startles when the outer door of the airlock clangs open. She hears the hiss of the pressurization, then the beep signaling that he can enter. She scrambles to the far end of the bed. The man seems bigger standing than he was on the floor. She covers her face with her arms and squeezes her eyes shut, as if by blocking him out, she can convince herself he’s not there. Her heart is pounding, entire body trembling, and her breath is coming out in quick gasps. She can hear him moving around near her, and thinks: this is it. He’s going to rape her, or kill her, and she hopes deep-down he’ll do the latter before the former.

When his movements fall silent and she can no longer tell his position in the room, she risks a peek up. He’s back to the corner, sitting on the floor, rifle over his lap. She looks around, finds a bag beside her. He nods toward it.

Hesitantly, she pulls it open and glances inside. A few protein bars, some tangerines, applesauce, little tins of meat they save for emergency rations. And — she reaches inside and pulls it out — a chocolate bar, like the one she’d given the janitor last week. This one is a different flavor though, caramel, but still. Just yesterday her biggest concerns were exhaustion, her grades, and wanting the cute janitor to talk to her. It feels so long ago.

It sickens her to see the silver lining, but she does anyway: she can sleep as long as she wants now, and she doesn’t have anything to do. No obligations or responsibilities. It’s not a relief, she tells herself. But — it kind of is.

She tries to speak, but nothing comes out. She clears her throat and rasps, “Is this one meal, or — how long is this supposed to last me? So I know how much to eat.”

He holds up one finger.

“One meal?”

He shakes his head.

“One day.”

He nods.

“How do I know how long a day is?”

He points to the ceiling. She looks up at the whirring fan, sees only the light from — something.

He points to the floor, where the wide beam of light has fallen. It’s moved since she woke up. It used to be half against the far wall, and now it’s entirely on the floor. The Ark rotates, orbits the Earth, and both revolve around the sun. She does some quick calculations.

“We make a complete rotation around the center of the Ark four times a day, so — every fourth time the light is in the center of the room is when you’ll bring more food.”

He nods.

She swallows hard, brings together all her courage, and asks, “So if you’re bringing me food, that means you’re not planning to kill me. At least, not right away.”

He offers no response.

“Are you planning to hurt me?”

Still no response, but he moves his head away, downward and toward the door, a mindless, shameful motion. She can’t tell if that means he’s planning to, willing to, or that he hates that the question has been posed to him at all.

“If you’re feeding me, and you’re not planning to hurt me, that means — ransom. You’re looking for ransom. You’re holding me hostage because you want something. Is that right?”

Nothing. At least, nothing visible or discernible, but there’s something in the careful, tense poise of his body that tells her he’s uncomfortable. He’s listening to her, at the very least. Maybe wanting to talk. It occurs to her that he might be working for someone, just a grunt and not a criminal mastermind. Maybe he doesn’t want to be here either.

“Can we,” she stops, thinks about how best to phrase her question so he won’t go blank on her again like before. She needs to keep his attention. “We can talk about it, maybe. We can work something out. If — if it’s something my mother did, or the chancellor, I can talk to them. I can get you whatever you want.”

She’s pushing too far, losing him. He’s trying to shut her out.

“You know me, right? You’re someone I’ve met, or friends with, maybe. So you know what I’m like. You know I’m being sincere when I say I want to help. I know the chancellor is ruthless. I know my mom only gives medication when she absolutely has to. And don’t get me started on Sydney and Kane. But I promise, if you let me go, I can help you. And if you know me, then you know I keep my promises.”

He doesn’t respond, or make any indication that he’s listening, but she can feel the guilt coming off of him in waves. The desperation. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking on her part. She takes the candy bar from the bag and slides off the bed, as close to him as the chains will allow.

“Take off your mask, and let’s split this.” She holds the candy bar out to him. “It was so nice of you to get it for me. We can talk, and make a plan together. We can help each other, get us both out of this mess. Together.”

His breaths are even and measured. A small aerorecycling tank is strapped to his thigh, shut off. He’s breathing through the vent in his mask, the room's oxygen, keeping it on only to hide his identity. Its presence tells her that there’s no oxygen outside the door. She sets the candy bar on the floor between them, an offering.

“I bet you’re a kind person when it comes down to it. I don’t judge you for what you’ve done. I imagine you have your reasons. I know what this place can do to people. But —” She shouldn’t admit this, she should be tough about it. Stiff upper lip, her dad always says. “I’m really scared, and I’m in a lot of pain.”

His head snaps up. She wasn’t expecting that. He moves swiftly to his knees, in her space, the rifle still on the ground by the door, out of reach. On instinct, she scuttles back he approaches, and recoils when the cold rubber of his glove wraps around her hand. Firmly, he tugs it toward him, lifts it up to his visor to inspect her wrists, which have turned a muddy purple with bloodied lines where her skin has broken. She’s embarrassed by how much she’s shaking. A muffled breathy noise comes out from the mask, a sound she takes to be disappointment, or irritation, maybe. Like a _tsk._

She notices an embroidered badge on his suit. Knight, it says. She doesn’t know any Knights. Then again, he probably stole the suit.

“It’s my fault. I’m sorry.” This is how she knows she has problems — she can’t bear the thought of disappointing anyone, even her own kidnapper. When, or if, she gets out of here, she needs to reassess her life.

He runs a gentle thumb over the bruising. She gasps in pain. He squeezes her hand and shakes his head, as if to say, _Don’t do it again._

“I won’t.” Although the thought does occur to her — if she broke her wrists, would he get her help? Or would he just let them stay broken? Probably the latter. Or maybe he thinks she’s too much of a coward to do something like that, in which case, he must not know her at all.

He steps away, back toward the door, and takes his position on the floor again.

 

* * *

 

Now that she’s figured out the movement of light, it’s easier to track the time. She sleeps through nearly two rotations the next night, twelve hours, and wakes up refreshed for the first time in years. Knight is gone for longer today, and she uses the time to re-case the room, to make sure there’s nothing she missed the first time in her panicked state. She feels calmer now, has hope for herself. She’ll get out of here. She’ll get through this, and everything will be okay.

The way Knight reacted when she said she was in pain — that’s her ticket out. He acted rashly in checking on her. Came into arm’s reach. Outwardly he seems like a planned man, meticulous, having set all this up so thoroughly, but he might be impulsive in the right circumstance, too. If she’d thought of it sooner, she could have wrapped the chain around his neck and choked him. He must have known that, yet he touched her anyway. He’s either someone she knows, someone who cares about her, or a good man in a bad situation. A bad man would not have cared that she was in pain, would not have covered her with a blanket two nights in a row, would not have brought her a candy bar.

She comes up with a list of ways to hurt herself so horribly he would need to get her medical attention. She’s not ready to go to such drastic measures but she makes the list anyway. Break her wrists or fingers. Shatter the glass pitcher and cut herself open. Choke herself with the chain. Concuss herself on the fold-out bed or with the toilet seat. Bite her tongue out. Suffocate herself with the plastic bag the food came in. Starve herself. Dehydrate herself. She has no tools, but she has her own body and all the ways she’s willing to use it.

The risk, of course, is that she’s misjudged him and his motivations, given him an incorrect benefit of the doubt, her own belief-in-goodness bias, and he would take no action at all. Just let her die, and kidnap Wells next. The thought turns her insides to ice.

Wells would have been the better option in the first place. Clarke’s mom is on the council, but her authority doesn’t hold a candle to Jaha’s. Jaha would do anything for his son. There has to be a reason Knight chose her.

He returns hours later, after she’s watched the light spin in two more circles on the ground. For a while, she slipped into a dark place. Having imagined Wells in this position sent her spiraling, and her earlier hope dissipated. She revisited every way she’s failed, every mistake she’s made, all the ways her parents would be disappointed in her, knowing she’s not doing everything she can to get out of this situation. She’s not working hard enough. She’s never working hard enough.

The lock echoes as it falls. Her knees are clutched to her chest, on the bed, blanket around her shoulders. It doesn’t get above sixty degrees in here. When the circle of light is at its smallest, it drops even lower, and her scrubs are paper-thin. She doesn’t bother looking up, or force herself to stop shivering, can’t seem to pull her attention away from the circle of light. She senses his immediate curiosity and concern. He sets the new bag of food on the bed and takes the empty one. She doesn’t make a move for it, even though she ran out of food hours ago and her stomach is growling. She can hear him settle in his position in the corner.

The circle makes an eighth rotation and still she doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Barely blinks. At first it was unintentional, until she noticed it unnerved him. She can sense every minor shift in his movement, the swish of canvas, his careful attention on her. His breath. She counts rotations of the fan. He’s weak, she thinks. He’s weak, and she’s going to ruin him.

By the 1,727th rotation, he stands and leaves. She won’t touch the food, wants to see what will happen when she refuses to eat. Needs to know how deep his concern runs.

He returns another quarter circle later. She still won’t look at him. He sets something on the bed and goes back to the corner, but doesn’t sit down. Like he’s waiting to see what she’ll do. Finally her curiosity gets the best of her, and she looks at what he brought.

A sketchbook. _Her_ sketchbook. The one she keeps in her backpack, which she was wearing when he kidnapped her. He has her things. Her textbooks, notebooks, pens. The correspondence journal she trades off with Wells since they don’t have time anymore to hang out. He could have looked through all of it, her private things, all her thoughts and fears. He might know her better than she thinks.

A single pencil sits on top of the sketchbook. Another weapon. She picks up the pencil and paper, holds it all against her chest and closes her eyes. Pieces of home. Pieces of her old life.

“Thank you,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Days pass, these shorter because she has her sketchbook to occupy herself. It’s been so long since she’s had time to draw, the only thing she really loves doing. She hates how grateful she is to have this back, the freedom to create, even if her freedom in general has been taken. He brings her little gifts every day: a sharpener when he notices her pencil has gone dull, an eraser when hers grinds down to the metal, some charcoal, books to read. She spends most of her time drawing landscapes of earth she’s seen in textbooks, but spaces out and finds herself sketching anatomy — arms, legs, a torso, hands, all belonging to a man. What she’s doing is so apparent that when he opens the door to bring her food, she quickly turns the page and sits up straighter.

Today he has a bag of food and a pile of something else, what looks like folded fabric. Maybe he’s finally brought her a change of clothes. She’s been wearing her scrubs for days now. Her scalp itches. She imagines she looks horrible, and smells it too, gets immediately angry with herself for caring what he thinks of her, and angrier for looking forward to his return every day, even if he doesn’t speak to her or interact with her. She has to keep constant vigilance on herself not to normalize what’s happening, and even then, it’s a losing battle. It’s her impulse to make the best of everything, to adapt, to always convince herself everything is okay. She’s always happy to see him, and she hates herself.

He gestures for her to stand, so she does. Then he points to the back wall. She goes to the wall and presses her back to it. He moves beside her to release the chain from the pole. He won’t turn his back to her. Smart. He gestures with his head toward the door, which is still open.

“What are we doing?” she asks. He jostles the chain to get her moving. She holds her ground. She finds one of her few joys here is irritating him, making him work for the things he wants her to do. It’s the only way she can ever win at chess with Wells. Wells, who memorizes books about chess, and Clarke who has never read one in her life, who plays entirely on gut instinct. She has one strategy, and it always works: make him move. Put him on the defense. Force his hand.

Knight doesn’t fall for her games today. He yanks the chain, hard enough that pain pulses through her bruised wrists and she trips forward, gasping. Then he pulls something out of his pocket and places it in her hands. An oxygen mouthpiece, attached via tube to the small aerorecycling tank at his thigh.

“Someone’s in a bad mood today.”

She places it firmly over her nose and mouth, and he shoves her back between her shoulder blades, forces her through the door, into the airlock. The door behind them hisses closed, and they have to wait for the light on the second door to turn green. The temperature drops rapidly. She shrugs her shoulders up, wishing she’d brought her blanket.

“I’m cold,” she says, muffled into her mouthpiece.

He shoves her again. More of a nudge, actually. The gesture is surprisingly playful. So, she shoves him back. A sound comes out of his mask that might be a laugh.

She should be scared. But she’s not.

The door in front of them blinks green. Knight lifts the lever and pushes it open. For the first time she gets an eyeful of what’s outside, some kind of engine room. It’s dark except for a couple weak rays of sunlight piercing the skylights and splitting through the beams. A German flag is painted on a big dead reactor. Ark History Trivia: the Germans built a satellite to test fusion reactors, hence why the area is always tilted toward the sun. And, being German, the living quarters were compact and minimal, as close to the work as the astronauts could get. This part of the Ark had once been the used as housing for the poorest people, but was evacuated ten years ago to save oxygen.

He rests a hand on her shoulder and guides her to the left. She should have put on her shoes. Her feet are going numb. They walk in a straight line, and as they go, she tries to take in as much as she can, but the place is dark, and she’s so cold that she can barely drag in a breath. He places a palm on her back to urge her forward more quickly, until they get to another airlock, and he shuts the door and lowers the lever. It’s slower to warm up than it was to cool down. She’s shaking, and even though he’s behind her, based on the tension she can feel radiating from him, she gets the strong sense he wants to put his arms around her. She’s pretty sure he’s the worst kidnapper of all time.

The light turns green and he pushes the door open, flicks on a light. Shower stalls line both sides of the narrow room, none of them with doors or curtains. She hands the mouthpiece back to him and asks, “So how’s this going to work?”

He pushes her toward the first stall, where a towel is already hanging on a peg, and a little bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap stand on top of the low wall. He sets the pile of clothes on a bench in the middle of the room, then steers her into a stall, and barricades the opening with his body. He pulls off both of his gloves and shoves them in his pockets. His skin is dark, dotted with little moles and freckles. He presses his thumb against the fingerprint pad at the side of her wrist, and the cuffs unlock. She tugs them off and they clatter to the floor. He takes her wrist and inspects it. The bruising has faded a little, but parts of her skin are still raw and beginning to scab over. His touch is warm, gentle. He holds her hand longer than necessary, then lets her go.

When she doesn’t move, he points to the shower head insistently.

“You’re going to watch me shower.”

He points to the door in a way that says, _Would you rather go back?_

“Pervert.”

The movement of his head makes her strongly suspect he’s rolling his eyes.

With the cuffs off, she stretches. Her shoulders crack, her neck. She turns her back to him and pulls off her top, tosses it into the stall adjacent. Her bra comes next, and she nearly moans at the relief of its absence. If she had any idea she was going to get kidnapped, she wouldn’t have worn her least comfortable bra. Her pants come next, and her underwear. She throws them behind her and hears him sigh. She enjoys the thought of him picking up after her.

She pulls the hair tie out of her braid and, as she untangles her hair, feels how greasy and oily it’s become. She’d felt gross when she’d been kidnapped, and now it’s nearly unbearable. She tries not to think of Knight at her back, and everything he can see.

The shower head is directly above her. She twists the knob to the right. Freezing cold water spits out in a rush. She shouts and huddles against him to get out of the cold spray. He puts his bare hand at the small of her back, rubs in a soothing circle before going still, as if he hadn’t realized he was doing it. After a moment, he lifts off, tests the water, brings it back, and lets it trickle over her. Warmer now. Nearly hot. She steps away from him, quickly crossing her arms over her chest, and turns toward the spray.

She decides to take her time, let the high pressure pound against her tense shoulders. She’s gotten so good at reading him, at being able to tell when he’s watching her, thinking about her, but not right now. She can’t feel anything from him at all.

So she moans, a quiet sound in her throat. When that gets nothing out of him, she does it louder, mouth open this time, and turns toward him to get the shampoo, on full display now, and this time she can feel it, his eyes on her. He shifts his weight to his other foot, caught in the act of ogling her, and lowers his head. A modest kidnapper. She can’t believe it.

She washes her hair four times, twice at the roots and twice at the ends, can sense his irritation that she’s gone through nearly the whole bottle, but in her defense, her hair was really dirty. She takes the bar of soap and slides it over her arms, her stomach, her breasts, lingers far too long between her legs, moans a little more, relishes in his continued discomfort. He should have never let his goodness become so apparent. He should have kept her afraid. But now, she trusts him. Trusts he won’t hurt her. Trusts he’ll accommodate her. He’s only in it for the ransom.

She replaces the bar of soap back on the wall. Comes back and slots her hand between her legs, where she's slick and swollen. She hasn’t touched herself in so long. Even before she got kidnapped, she always passed out from exhaustion before she could masturbate. But it’s something about the moment, being watched by him, a man in a mask who doesn’t want to hurt her. She’s forcing his hand again. If he turns away, if he doesn’t want to watch, he risks her escaping. If he does watch, that makes her correct: he really is a pervert.

 _Forcing his hand._ The thought almost makes her laugh. She steps forward out of the spray and tugs at his hand, slots it between her legs. He jerks it away, but she grabs it again and presses it against herself. “Get me off. It’s the least you can do.”

A sound comes through the mask, a growl of frustration. He’s mad at her. Good. She’s mad at him too.

He rolls his fingers against her clit politely. His face is turned, so she takes the nozzle of the mask and pulls it back toward her. She stares through the visor, into his eyes which, this close, look like they might be brown. They don’t belong to anyone she recognizes. Maybe he really is a stranger.

“Harder. Put them inside me.”

He slides a finger into her, then a second. She clutches his suit in her fists, rides his hand.

“How does it feel? Finger-fucking the teenage girl you kidnapped? Feel good about yourself?”

The frustrated noise again. He presses her firmly against the stall wall, his other arm across her chest, pinning her. Regaining the power. But it’s too late. He’d have to rape her, or hit her, and he won’t. He’s in the line of the spray, but it only trickles down the waterproof mask and jumpsuit.

He fucks her hard and fast with his fingers, rough pad of his hand slamming against her clit. She should be ashamed of herself for how hot she finds this, hotter than anything she’s experienced yet. She’s only had sex once, at a mixer when she was sixteen with a boy named Corvin who stopped speaking to her after. Sex is the luxury of people with time and energy on their hands. She could pursue it more aggressively, if she was really interested, but — with Corvin at least — she felt so much pressure to appease him, to make him feel good, and he didn’t seem to care at all about what felt good to her. With Knight, she can take and take, be selfish, angry, cruel, ugly. Around him, she can be whoever she wants to be, knowing that no matter how bad she is, he’s worse.

She cries out when she comes, as loudly as she wants, something she doesn’t get at home, where she has to be quiet all the time. Her shouts echo off the tile, sting her still-sore throat. She stares into his mask, into his eyes as she finishes, wants him to know that she sees him, sees who he really is. He brings his fingers up and presses them into her mouth, in and out slowly, transfixed. She tastes herself on him, sucks him clean, wishes he would get her off again already.

When he lets them slip away, she tugs at the base of his mask and says, “Take off your mask. Let me kiss you.”

He shakes his head.

A bubble of anger bursts over her. It feels so good to let herself be angry. “Well fuck you too.”

She shoves him away, twists off the shower, yanks the towel from the peg and dries herself quickly. The room is all fogged up.

She puts on her clothes. Comfortable pants, a shirt, clean underwear. No bra, of course. She decides to go without, rather than finding her old one. The clothes are strange, not like anything she’s seen before. They look like they’re made from scraps. The stitching at the seams is uneven, done by hand. The underwear is a size too small for her hips, but the pants stretch. Clothes for someone much younger and smaller than her. He misjudged her size.

When she’s dressed, he pushes her down onto the bench.

“Stop it. I don’t like it when you push me around.”

He doesn’t acknowledge her, instead reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small tin, then kneels down. He opens it. It’s some kind of paste, homemade, not something she keeps in the clinic. He dips two fingers in and pulls one of her hands toward himself, begins spreading the salve over her wrist. It burns and throbs. She hisses in through her teeth. He makes quick work of her left and moves to her right. She considers kneeing him in the face and running, but she wouldn’t make it far without the aerorecycler.

When he’s done, he slides the tin back in his pocket and pulls out a couple rolls of gauze, wraps one gently around her wrist, then the other.

“I want lemon for my throat, too,” she says, standing and holding her arms out, waiting for the chains to come back on. “And a sweater. I’m tired of being cold all the time.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you sleep when you’re in here with me?” she asks, knowing he won’t answer. She’s huddled on the bed, trying to sleep, but can’t. Based on the circle of light on the floor, it’s late. She wishes there was a way to darken the room, but considering it’s the sun, that’s not an option. No wonder they evacuated this place.

“Is there someone you love?”

This is what she does every night before she falls asleep. Watches the fan rotate, spews out every stupid thought in her head, every memory, every story, every question. There’s something thrilling in talking to someone who won’t talk back. She can say whatever she wants without consequence. Outside, she always has to think before she speaks. She has her family’s reputation to uphold. If she takes a single step out of line — loses her temper, talks back to someone, says something tasteless — the rumor mill begins to churn, and she’ll get a talking-to from her mother about poise and tact. About how the Griffins are held to a higher standard, and Clarke has to uphold that standard, or else face ridicule by the masses, or worse, her mother will get voted off the council, and then where would they be?

“Where did you grow up? When’s your birthday? What’s your happiest memory?”

Sometimes she tries to bore him by listing prescription medications, their uses and their side effects. A series of _did you know_ factoids about the Ark. Her entire weekly schedule, down to the minute. She sings annoying, repetitive songs, ones that kids sing when they’re bored, that she knows will get stuck in his head. If their roles were reversed, she would have gagged him by now.

“Do you think about who I am, or am I just a body to you? A body you keep in a cage.”

She’s told him all of her secrets, fears, doubts. She told him about Wells, and how she wishes she could be a regular teenager. She told him about the shitty sex she had with Corvin, that she’s never gotten drunk or high, never kissed a girl (and wants to). She tells him honestly that she’s afraid, that at the end of all this, Knight is going to kill her anyway. And her biggest secret: more than anything, she wishes she could go to the ground, and live out her entire life in the landscapes that fill her sketchbooks.

“Has anyone even noticed I’m gone?”

 

* * *

 

She’s losing track of time. On what she thinks is the seventh day, she’s waiting at the very end of her chain. He’s late by an entire rotation. She’s hungry. What happens if he doesn’t come back one day? If he gets caught, tells the council he killed her, and they float him. She would die here.

It’s been a bad day. She ran out of room in her sketchbook, every inch of every page covered, including the front and back covers, and has no more eraser to make more space. Her pencil is down to a nub she can barely hold. She’s been using the charcoal to draw on the walls and floor, but it’s down to just a pebble. She tries to read the books he’s brought her but they only remind her that she’s behind on her reading assignments for school, missing out on her own life. Drawing is the only thing that really distracts her. She begged him to bring her more supplies yesterday, and he made no indication he would, but she’s held onto that bit of hope all day. Used it to keep her from spiraling into the dark place in her mind, which is becoming easier and easier to succumb to.

Another eighth rotation, and the outer door opens, closes, the airlock beeps, a pause, and there he is.

“Finally,” she says. “You’re late.”

He pushes past her and drops her food on the bed along with a book. She looks in the bag. Protein bars, meat tins. Not even fruit today. She picks up the book. The complete works of Shakespeare, Volume II.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

He grabs it from her, opens it, puts it in front of his face and moves it around sarcastically.

“I wanted art supplies. I _need_ something to draw with, or I’m going to go insane.”

He ignores her, shoves the book back into her hands and returns to his corner, arms over his chest.

“How much fucking longer am I going to be here, huh? Why hasn’t anyone contacted you about me?”

Nothing. She’s shown him too many of her cards. He knows now that she can’t stand when he’s not paying attention to her, when he blocks her out.

“You can take that stupid mask off. It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re getting floated.”

Not just silence, but stillness. He’s mastered the art of making himself another piece of furniture.

“Take off your mask and talk to me, goddammit!”

When still he does nothing, she pulls a protein bar from the bag and throws it at him, then another, a tin of meat. He still doesn’t move, just lets them hit him and clatter to the ground.

One thing she’s managed to piece together: he’s been giving her books from his personal collection. They all have BB written in light pencil at the top first-page corner. Not only is he a terrible kidnapper, he’s also a fucking nerd who monograms his own books. The worst part is, BB still doesn’t ring a bell. She’s gone through every name she’s ever heard, and she’s never met a BB. He really is a stranger. It consoles part of her, knowing no one she loves has betrayed her this deeply, but it also makes less sense. Why her? Why not someone more important?

She takes the Shakespeare book, opens it, grabs a handful of pages, and rips them out.

Knight, or BB, or whatever his name is, pushes himself off the wall and tries to grab the book out of her hands. She manages to keep it from him, spin around, and hit him in the head with it. It lands dully, awkwardly, no damage at all, and he finally pries it from her grip and wraps his gloved hand around her throat. Not squeezing, but the threat is there. She spits on his mask. He slams her against the wall.

“Kill me. It’s better than being stuck in here with you.”

She can hear the hollow sound of his breath in the mask.

“I hope whatever you’re fighting for is worth it. No matter what, you’re going to die.”

His face is so close that she can see his eyes again, wide and angry. Afraid, like she used to be. Like she isn’t anymore.

She gropes on the table for something. Her hand lands on the pitcher. She brings it up and swings it against his head. The pitcher shatters. Water splashes over them both. He reels to the side but doesn’t let her go, shakes his head of it and pins her harder against the wall, knee between her thighs, nearly crushing her pelvis. His fist clenches around her throat. She can’t breathe, scrabbles at his arm.

In chess, when Wells has her at a disadvantage, she starts moving in completely unpredictable ways, slides a piece across the board uselessly, making it seem as if she has a bigger plan, or puts a valuable piece in blatant danger. Sometimes it works; it breaks him of his programming, his rote memorization of moves, forces him to actually think on his own, and he’s never been great at that. Like her, Wells only ever does what he’s told.

She rocks her hips against Knight’s thigh. His head cocks to the side. _What the fuck are you doing?_

“C’mon,” she says, gasping in a ragged breath. “What’s the point in kidnapping a girl if you’re not going to rape her?”

She feels hideous saying it, but it lands. She knows how badly he doesn’t want to be doing this. Feels his guilt pounding through her own chest.

He shoves her away from him, hard, so that she falls onto the ground. Her hand lands on a piece of glass and pierces her palm, nearly all the way through her hand. For the first time since he first kidnapped her, she starts crying. 

She is the pitcher shattered on the ground.

He kneels down in front of her, pulls his glove off. Takes her hand in his. She lets him, just to feel a human touch. He pries the glass from her palm. It hurts worse than almost anything she’s ever felt, but she can’t bring herself to care. She watches the scene from outside her own body, tears streaming down her face, suddenly and completely numb.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up gasping, can’t pull in a breath. At first she thinks it’s the result of a nightmare, something in her lungs. Then she sees it, a red light pulsing in the corner of the room. The fan has gone still. The oxygen is dissipating.

“Help,” she says, falling off the bed, crawling toward him.

Finally he jolts awake, looks around. Spots the red light. He glances down; the aerorecycler turned on for him automatically. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the secondary mouthpiece, secures it over her nose and mouth. She closes her eyes, gulps in air.

If they’ve turned off the oxygen, that means they know where she is. It means they’re coming to save her.

No — if they turned off the oxygen, that means they’re trying to kill her. Rather, him. She’s just expendable.

Either way, they know where she is.

Knight seems to come to the same conclusion. He unstraps the aerorecycler from his thigh and hands it to her. Then he pauses, pulls in a deep breath, and takes off the mask.

Their eyes meet. It feels like solving a puzzle. Slotting the exact right piece into a bigger picture.

She sinks back into that night with the candy bar. How insistent the janitor had been that he didn’t want it. She thought he was being polite. He had to have known by then. He had this all planned out, her kidnapping, her undoing, and all she wanted was to see him smile.

He’s not smiling now, either.

He takes his rifle and rushes out the door. She looks at the aerorecycler and its glowing green number: 38. The number of minutes until she runs out of oxygen.

 

* * *

 

She is the sunlight, an intangible ray spreading through space. The countdown ticks all the way to zero. She slips into unconsciousness thinking about the earth. Maybe she'll finally get to go home.

 

* * *

 

She awakens an unknown amount of time later, expecting, bizarrely, to have been rescued. But she hasn’t. She’s in the same place, the fan is running again, she has an agonizing headache, and the janitor is staring at her from the corner. He’s not in his jumpsuit anymore, no longer Knight but BB, just a white t-shirt and the heavy black pants that guards wear.

The mouthpiece is gone, and she’s on the bed. He must have picked her up from the floor.

“It’s you,” she says.

He nods.

She lifts the chain and slams it down, just to hear the loud, echoing sound. “Say something, goddammit!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re _sorry?”_

“You know that already.”

She gets up and walks over to him as far as the chain will allow. “Come here.”

“No.”

“I said come here.”

“Clarke.”

She stops. He said her name. He knows her name. Of course he does. Why wouldn’t he?

“They did this, didn’t they?” she asks. “They turned off the oxygen. They tried to kill us.”

He nods again.

“They could have rescued me but instead they tried to suffocate me.”

This time he only looks down and away, as if it’s his fault the council tried to murder her.

She screams like she did that first day, starts yanking at the chain again just for the pain of it. To feel something, anything other than the empty pit the janitor carved into her. He slots himself behind her back and wraps his arms around her, pins them to her chest.

“Let go of me.”

“Not until you calm down.”

She struggles, tries to elbow her way out of his grip. She kicks his shin with her heel. He doesn’t budge. Eventually she wears herself out, sags all her weight against him.

“I’m not going to get out of here, am I?”

Silence. Like before.

“We’re going to die here together,” she says. 

He lets her go. She sits at the edge of the bed, stares at the brown dried blood stain on her palm, which he had wrapped so tenderly.

“I’ve barricaded the exits to the wing,” he says. “Cut the oxygen monitoring from the mainframe. The food we have left will have to last us.”

“Until when?”

“Until I get what I want.”

“And what’s that?”

“You know already.”

She shakes her head. She’s so tired. “I really don’t.”

“The girl under the floor is my sister.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It was all over the news. Everyone knew about it.”

She shrugs. “I was too busy. I had no idea.”

“How do you think a guard cadet gets demoted to a janitor?”

“I didn’t know you were a cadet. I don’t even know your name.” She looks him in the eye and adds, “I don’t pay much attention to people like you.”

Only in days of being trapped with him can she read the minute movement of his fingers in spite of his stoic expression. He’s so easy to hurt. One big open wound of a man.

“She’s in the Skybox,” he says. “They floated my mom already. They’re going to float Octavia when she turns eighteen.”

“And so, what, you want them to pardon the both of you? It’ll never work.”

“I want them to float me instead of her. It’s not her fault she was born.”

“So you’ve done all of this,” she says, gesturing around the room, “so they’ll kill you instead of her.”

He nods.

“You are so fucking dumb. They’re just going to kill you _then_ her.”

“We’re negotiating that. I want a full legal pardon. Documentation. Jaha is a man of his word, and I want his word that she'll be safe.”

“And Jaha won’t do it.”

“He says he doesn’t negotiate with criminals.”

“So — instead of doing a swap, which is an incredibly simple solution that would lead to my immediate and safe rescue, and in the end keep the exact same headcount as if your sister had been floated, they tried to kill both of us?”

“Yeah.”

There’s a chance he’s lying. She knows he’s not, though, knows he’s an honest man, and probably a terrible liar.

“They don’t care about me at all, do they?” she asks.

“Clarke…”

“Do they?”

“They just — they don’t negotiate.”

“So where do you go all day? How do you communicate with them?”

“There was a comm working across the way. I have a network of people who bring me the things I need. Now I don’t.”

“Then why did you stay masked this whole time? If they already knew who you were?”

“I didn’t want you to know it was me.”

She stands from the bed. “Take off the chains.”

“Clarke,” he says, a warning.

“There’s nothing I can do. Your rifle is gone. You have the shock baton. If I tried to attack you, you’d get the upper hand. And also — I just won’t.” She lifts her wrists. “Take them off.”

He considers it for a long moment, then presses his thumb against the latch. The cuffs unlock, and she slides them off of her wrists, throws them onto the ground.

She lies on the bed, curled toward the wall.

“Lay down.”

He doesn’t move.

“I said lay down. I’m so fucking tired of you staring at me from the goddamn corner all night.”

He lies down beside her. There’s barely enough room for the both of them on the narrow cot. She’s about to ask him to hold her, but he must sense it on his own, because he wraps an arm around her, and holds her close to his chest.

 

* * *

 

They wake up at the same time, slowly, with the circle of light falling over them. She can feel his erection at the small of her back, moves back against it on instinct. Listens as he drags in a surprised breath. She knows almost nothing about him, not his name or his history, and also everything, the meaning behind each shift and movement of his body, every breath into his lungs. She knows that he’s grown to love her, and that his love is a hideous thing.

She takes his hand and guides it under her shirt, over her bare stomach, up to her breast.

“Clarke,” he says, his morning voice a low crackle. A warning is threaded into his tone, one that tells her he won’t say no.

He pinches and teases her nipple, presses a kiss to the back of her neck, his hips harder against her.

She lowers her pants and underwear to her thighs.

He fumbles at the button of his pants, shoves them down, his hard cock settled at the small of her back.

She thinks of the council sitting around their table, voting on what to do about Clarke Griffin. She wonders if it had to be a unanimous decision, if her mother voted in favor of it. She hates that she’s not sure anymore. The only person she can trust is Knight.

He slides his cock between her thighs.

“Sure about this?” he whispers as he runs a light hand over her stomach, a gesture filled with so much affection it almost makes her sick.

“We’re dying anyway,” she says.

The head of his cock breaches her. She digs her nails into her healing palm, something to hurt worse than the pain between her legs. Corvin hurt a little, but not like this. She bites her lip and can’t help the little cry that gets lodged in her throat. He must take it for pleasure, because he pushes forward another inch, pulls out, and back in further.

The pain is so much and so intense that she can’t think of anything else, not her mother’s raised hand in the council meeting to determine Clarke’s execution, not Wells or Unity Club or any of the other things she’s missed. Not Knight curled around her back, exactly like he is now, with a chloroformed cloth pressed to her mouth.

“Harder,” she chokes out. He fucks into her faster. She bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, grips the blanket tightly in her fist.

He slots a hand between her legs and fingers her in time with his movements, which grow steady and rhythmic. She forces herself to relax, focus on his quick shallow breaths against her neck, fingers deftly rolling against her clit. The pain subsides; pleasure replaces it, all-consuming. She is a throat that screams. Hands that break. A body that bleeds.

She wishes Knight had been doing this the whole time. She wishes he had beaten her, raped her, broken her. He would be worse than the council, then. She could hate him more than she hates them.

Her walls start to flutter around his cock, and his finger digs into her just so, and she surprises herself by how quickly and how hard she comes. He follows after, stilling on an inward thrust. She can feel it, him filling her up after all the emptying he’s done. He relaxes, catches his breath, rests his head on the nape of her neck, while thinking, maybe, of what little time they have left.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up later and he’s gone. At the comm, maybe. Negotiating or whatever. She knows what she has to do. What she should have done a long time ago. The only absolutely guaranteed way out, one way or the other.

She gets out of bed, picks up a shard of the glass pitcher, and scrapes it down the length of each arm. Then she sits in the circle of light, and waits.

Sometimes you have to sacrifice the queen to win the game.  


	2. Chapter 2

_Art by anon_

 

* * *

 

He finds her sitting cross-legged in the circle of light, chin to her chest, long hair falling over her shoulders. Her pale skin nearly glows. Her hands are resting on her knees. For a second he thinks she’s meditating, and is about to ask why, until it registers that the floor is not supposed to be red. A pool of blood glistens in the sunlight, spreading rapidly, all the way to his toes.

“Fuck.” He lifts a hand to his hair. “Clarke. _Fuck.”_

She’s dying. Right now, this very second, and if he doesn’t do something —

She lifts her head. Her eyes are glazed-over, face sallow and empty. She couldn’t have done it more than a couple minutes ago.

“Your move, Knight.”

Now that he’s been caught, now that Kane knows where they are — it was only a matter of time anyway. She knows he’s gotten weak for her. He had planned this for weeks, thought of every detail, left no stone un-turned. Where he failed was in underestimating her. The lengths she would be willing to go to escape.

He pulls a rag out of his back pocket, the hand towel sitting on the bed, kneels down and wraps her arms in them as tightly as he can. He secures the sidealong oxygen mask to her face. Her blood has already drenched the rags. He hooks an arm under her knees, one at her back, and lifts her up.

 

* * *

 

He has never been more grateful for the council’s bureaucratic bullshit. Until he can be tried and sentenced by unanimous order of the council, he’s been sent to the Skybox. It’ll only be a matter of days. Maybe hours, depending on their workload.

It was all for nothing. He’ll get floated, and so will Octavia. He doesn’t even know if Clarke is alive. When he brought her out, Kane was waiting for him. A guard took Clarke from his arms and rushed her to medbay. Someone tased him, and for good measure, they beat him too, and dragged him into a cell. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. A few days, maybe. The Skybox was made by the Germans too. The room is nearly identical, except for the lack of sunlight. That was why he picked that room — it was the brightest and warmest. He tried. He tried to make it not awful for her, but there’s only so much you can do in a kidnapping, when oxygen and food are already sparse.

The good news is, he’s never bored. No one with all of his regrets could ever be bored. There’s too much to revisit, too many missteps taken. Ample opportunity to relive the horrible moments over and over — Octavia being dragged away. Their mom floated. Clarke, on the first day, the moment she realized what had happened to her. Nearly breaking her own wrists to escape. Guiding his hand between her legs against his will. And the blood. All the blood. A whole ocean of it. That’s what he sees when he closes his eyes. That’s what he dreams when he sleeps. Every night, he drowns in a wide, bottomless sea of Clarke Griffin’s blood.

He underestimated his feelings for her, too. Doesn’t want to think about it, what happened to his heart in that room. Watching her sleep, listening to her talk, looking through her drawings. Her skin under his palms. Sharp, cunning eyes observing him, tracking him, filing every detail away. The way she enveloped him, mind and body. Her rage and scorn roiling under trained composure.

He hears voices outside the door. The Skybox has no airlocks; it’s an internal area, no risk of a hull breach. It’s not mealtime, he thinks.

Execution time, then. Took them long enough.

He stands and faces the back wall, clasps his hands behind his head. The door opens. One set of footsteps enter. The door closes again. The heavy lock falls.

“Turn around.”

He lowers his hands. Squeezes his eyes shut, nearly cries in relief. He turns around slowly, in case his mind is playing tricks on him, like it’s been doing, from his near-starvation and lack of sleep.

He keeps his head down, eyes trained at her feet, then upward — regular pants, a plain knit top, golden hair in a braid over her shoulder — and to her eyes, stark blue weighed down with dark circles. Her skin is pale. Her arms are across her chest, bandaged from elbow to wrist. She’s lost so much weight since he kidnapped her. And something else too, the light in her eyes that he admired so much, back when he was a janitor and she was an intern, complete strangers. How easily she once smiled. He took it all from her, everything good. She'll never be the same.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“How did you get in here alone?”

“When you come back almost dead from a kidnapping, you can pretty much do whatever you want.” She nods to the cot. “Sit down.”

He does, perched at the edge, as far away from her as he can get, but she comes and sits right beside him, places a hand on his knee. He hates himself for lacking the willpower to ignore it, rests his hand on top of hers, curls his fingers around her palm. She lets him.

“I’m so angry,” she says. “Everything I used to be drained away, and all that’s left is fury.”

“I know.”

“Not toward you. Them. You had to hide your own sister under the floor for sixteen years. And now they want to kill her, a teenage girl, for the crime of being born. They knew where I was, and thought the problem would be easier handled, quieter, by killing the both of us, and telling the press it had been a mechanical glitch. I have no allegiance or loyalty to these people anymore. I believe the way you and your family were treated is unjust. I hate that I was the victim of your crime, but I understand your reasons for committing it.”

He runs his thumb gently over the back of her hand. If he focuses only on her soft skin and the quiet hum of the Ark, he can almost pretend they’re back in the old room, when he was living on a single spark of hope, and his deepening, disgusting feelings for the girl he kidnapped. It's a sick thought, but one he covets regardless.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “And I know an apology pales in comparison to what I’ve done, but I need you to know — back before all this, I wanted to talk to you. After O was arrested, you were the only one who treated me like a person.”

“So that’s why you chose me. I was nice to you.”

“I chose you because I had access to you. Your mom was on the council. Your schedule ran like clockwork. I thought they would do anything to get you back. It seemed like such a reasonable solution to me, trade me for O. I honestly thought it would only take a day or two, tops. And you were so tired anyway. I convinced myself maybe you would just get caught up on sleep. That it could be a, I don’t know, vacation, kind of, once you realized I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“I was trapped in a cell with a man in a mask who wouldn’t speak to me, and you thought it would be a vacation?”

“I grew up with a girl who lived under the floor. My entire life revolved around her. For me it was just more of the same. A different brand of entrapment. I forgot what it feels like to have your freedom taken from you.”

She watches the movement of his thumb across her hand. He shouldn’t say what he wants to say. He shouldn’t tell her. But he’s about to die, so —

“I think if this hadn’t happened, I could have loved you. We could have loved each other.”

A different set of problems in an alternate timeline. Clarke falling in love with a lowly guardsman, fielding her parents’ disapproval, while he hides his sister from her and lets the guilt of his secret devour him.

She pulls her hand away. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. You know it is.”

Her silence confirms her agreement. At once he is elated and defeated. He was hoping maybe it had all been in his head, unrequited, a way to distract himself from the horrors of their reality. It’s somehow worse to know that beneath all her hatred, all the ways he’s broken her, her love for him lies dormant, a seed buried too deeply to sprout.

“The Ark is running out of oxygen,” she says. “That’s what I came here to tell you.”

It doesn’t surprise him. Unrest has been spreading for years. A tighter grip on the population from the powers that be.

“My dad says we have a better chance of surviving on earth. There’s a drop ship. The one they were saving for a hundred years from now. I know a girl, an engineer, who can launch it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m staging a coup. In two days, every cell in the Skybox will open, and when that happens, I’m going to get every single delinquent on that ship, and drop you all to the ground.”

“What about you?”

“I have to stay behind. Things are going to get bad here. Medical neglect to prune the population. Mass asphyxiations pitched as mechanical failure. Riots. Someone needs to organize the revolt.”

She reaches behind her back and returns with a handgun. For a second he thinks she’s going to shoot him, but instead, she hands it to him. He takes it.

“You’re the only person I can trust,” she says. “When the doors open, I need you to get everyone to cargo bay five, and shoot anyone who gets in the way. Then, when you get to the ground, if you survive, they’re going to need a leader.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“You don’t have a choice. You stay, you die.”

Her eyes flick down to his mouth. He can never tell if she wants to fight him or fuck him. She could beat him senseless and he’d let her, wouldn’t put up a fight. She reaches up and trails a gentle finger over the cut on his cheekbone, the bruise leading up to his eye from a guard’s knee smashing into his face.

He grips her hair in his fist and presses his mouth to hers. She clutches his shirt in her fist, snakes her tongue into his mouth, and for a second, everything is gone, the masquerade, the kidnapping, the Skybox, and he’s just a janitor again, finally getting up the courage to ask out the cute med intern, the only person in the entire clinic who can even see him, whose eyes don’t pass over him and move on to more important things.

She tugs at his lower lip with her teeth, kisses with no finesse, all rough edges and fast movement. He should have known; Clarke Griffin looks soft from afar, but up close she’s a blunt weapon, heavy and deadly to whoever has her attention.

When she pulls away, she says, “I can’t stop thinking about you. You’re the only thing in my head. I close my eyes, and I see that stupid mask. I hate that you’re inside me now, and I hate that you’re not with me always. Not watching from the corner. Not touching me. I hate it. I hate you.”

“Then why are you trying to save me?”

She kisses him again, lightly. “Because death is too good for you.”

It’s horrible, fucked up beyond comprehension, but hope blooms in his chest, of landing on the ground, completely free. Of sunlight, and oceans, and the wild green earth. And Clarke, at his side. A cabin by the river. Just the two of them.

“Come with us,” he says. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

He imagines the violence of revolution. Clarke leading the charge. Now that the thinks it, he realizes it’s what she was made for. How could he have ever underestimated her?

“Let someone else do it. Come to the ground with us, let me show you who I really am. What our life could be.”

“You’re a good man, Bellamy Blake.” She said his name. He loves the sound of it in her mouth. Wants her to say it again and again. “But even good men can’t be redeemed, when what they’ve done is bad enough.”

She stands. His hand falls back into his lap. He can still taste her on his lips.

“The engineer gave the plan to her boyfriend, who’s in the Skybox. He’ll spread the word to the others. When it’s time, you’ll hear the door unlock, and when that happens, be ready to fight.”

“Where will you be?”

She pounds twice on the door with the side of her fist. “At school.”

 

* * *

 

He sleeps in fits, minutes at a time, the way he’s been doing for weeks now. With Clarke, he kept jolting awake thinking she’d made it out of the chains, or that Kane and his guard were busting through the door. Sometimes Bellamy watched her sleep, her shoulder rise and fall with her breath, curled up against the wall. He can’t imagine being allowed to live, knowing the Ark is dying, and her with it.

The coup happens in the middle of the night. He bolts awake at the echoing clang of every lock in the Skybox, the pummeling of two hundred feet on the ground. He palms his gun and pushes the door of his cell open. Four delinquents rush past, laughing.

He inches out of the cell and looks both ways. No guards. He follows the four delinquents, can see dozens more on every level of the Skybox rushing toward the drop ship.

He makes it to a stairwell and runs down two at a time. Octavia has to be somewhere among the stampede. She’s smart, resourceful; she’ll get there. He keeps the gun down by his hip.

He reaches a hallway, turns right, away from cargo bay five and toward the council chambers where Clarke lives. Behind him, he hears the halting of footsteps, and, “Bellamy?”

He stops, turns around. Before he can even register what’s happening, Octavia is jumping into his arms. He closes his eyes and presses his face into the crook of her neck. She clings to him so tightly he can barely breathe, but it’s fine, it’s all fine. Octavia is alive and well, and they’re going to the ground, and they’ll be free.

He sets her down, hesitant to let go, and says, “You go ahead. I need to look for someone.”

“We don’t have time. They’re launching in five minutes.”

“I’ll make it, just go.”

The alarms have just begun to sound. Emergency lights flash. Someone on an intercom is telling them to return to their cells.

Before he can make it to the council chambers, he hears a scream, one he is sadly, horribly familiar with. He sprints toward it, guards rushing past him, ignoring him in the fray probably only because he’s too old and running in the wrong direction. He finds Clarke in front of the main airlock, held at the arms by two guards. He presses his back against a wall around a corner so they won’t see him, and risks a quick glance around it. Dr. Griffin is there, stoic and silent, chin held high. Clarke’s dad is nowhere to be seen. Kane is with them, too, but he’s out of uniform, no gun on him that Bellamy can see, like he’d been interrupted on his day off. Clarke struggles against the guards’ grip.

“Mom, please, I swear, I had nothing to do with this.”

Kane opens the inner door to the airlock.

“You need to vote on this,” Clarke says. “It needs to be unanimous.”

“Not anymore,” Kane replies.

Bellamy steps out from behind the wall, raises the gun, and shoots the first guard in the back of the head. He doesn’t let himself think. Doesn’t let himself feel. Blanks out, like he did when he kidnapped Clarke. The second guard is reaching for his own gun when Bellamy pops off a second shot. His aim is slightly off, hits the guard in the cheek, but it does the job. He falls against the wall, grasping his face. Abby screams. Kane is taking a menacing step forward and shouting into a walkie talkie for backup he won’t receive. Bellamy grabs Clarke by the hand and yanks her forward. They sprint toward the cargo bay. A gun goes off behind them, the second guard. The bullet hits a wall beside their heads.

Bellamy turns, nearly skidding into a wall, and continues running, Clarke’s steps close behind. He can see the drop ship in the distance, can hear a new voice on the intercom, a woman’s, slow and sarcastic: “Last call, delinquents. Last call for the drop ship. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

The door of the ship is open wide, three steps leading up into it. Clarke catches up to him, heaving. He holds the door, ushers for her to go in first, looking around in a panic for the guards.

She hesitates.

“Clarke,” he says, “get in.”

“I can't.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“I’ll hide.”

“You have to come with us.”

“They already killed my dad. I can’t leave Wells. I can’t leave all these people here to die.”

On the intercom, the voice says, “This is your pilot Raven speaking. Please keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Sixty seconds to lift-off, folks. Or drop-down, as it were.”

A bullet lands on the hull of the drop ship and ricochets off. They both duck.

“I’ll pick you up and drag you in there if I have to,” Bellamy says.

Clarke looks into the ship. “If we both get down there, and we survive, I need you to know, no matter how much you love me, no matter how many people you kill for me, I will never forgive you.”

The guards are catching up. Their guns are drawn.

“I wouldn’t want you to,” he says.

A silent acknowledgement passes between them: in spite of all that has happened, they’ll be linked together the rest of their lives. He is ready to fall in step with her, kill for her, die for her, follow her into hell — she, the queen, and he, the knight at her side.

At last, shoulders squared, she climbs into the ship.

He follows in after her, and pulls the door shut.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr, twitter, and dw as bettsfic.
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic, you can [reblog the post](https://bettsfic.tumblr.com/post/181361437332/boy-with-the-broken-halo-clarke-gets-kidnapped-by).


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